Part of my new year routine is taking time to answer Donald Whitney's 10 Questions for the New Year, as you would probably know if you've been reading this blog for a while. It is always meaningful reading through last year's answers, and realizing how much you'd forgotten or fulfilled since then. What I found most interesting was that each year, one particular thing seemed to repeat itself, to reappear in several answers like it was the theme of that year. Last year's emerged as knowing God better. Learning to love His attributes. Learning more about the person of God. Learning to see how His attributes applied to my life in a concrete way. I phrased this idea differently in several answers but in essence that was it. This time, it was simpler. I need to protect my devotions and prayer time, I found myself writing several times in my answers, using almost the same words each time because somehow they were the right ones. I was surprised at myself. Protect wasn't a word I'd ever used in this context. But I thought back to how I had lapsed for weeks because oh, it was the holidays; I slept late last night; I'd just take a quick scroll down this feed, or check those pesky unread messages first; or there were so many things waiting to be done, I'd just get a head start on clearing them today and be so productive....! Protect, I realized, was an apt word. I need to protect that short pocket of time every day from distractions, from work, from laziness. There were so many reasons and excuses one could pick from, and it got easier everyday. I'll start next week, on Monday, get up early and all that, put my life back into balance again, I would think. Like so many (doomed) diets and exercise plans this thought has seen, it didn't quite work out. I had to protect the time I spent on prayer and devotions from my own excuses. This was a humbling realization. It was not so much my schedule and all the responsibilities on me. It was not so much whether I'd slept late last night or not. It was just making small decisions--the same small decisions--every day, faithfully. Put down the phone. Those messages can wait, it's not like reading them now accomplishes anything. You don't need to be immediately updated on what the world has been doing for the past few hours you were asleep. Don't look at your schedule yet. You'll be spending the rest of the day looking at it, after all. It's like training a child to make their bed in the morning. Growing up we all had to do what my mom called the Five Morning Duties. (always in capitals, in my mind. They were important in a basic, pragmatic way; they existed, simply, the way the Seven Wonders of the World or the Four Great Beauties of China did, regardless of your existence.) Make your bed. Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Comb your hair. Change your clothes and take out the dirty ones. Making the bed was the first one, which led to the others, and it took as little as a minute--fold your blanket, pick up your stuff toys if they had fallen onto the ground, and pull the quilt over everything. (or prop the mattresses against the wall, in the early days before we got our bunk bed.) It was a decision you made in those first few seconds after you sat up in bed, it didn't take a lot of effort, but you had to make it every day, and it was being able to make it every day that was the greatest accomplishment of all to your mom. But small decisions, to be made every day, are easy to fail in. That's why the word protect kept coming to my mind when I looked back soberly upon the weeks which had slid by this past year, each day a chance I had knowingly passed by. In 2017, I want to protect the time I give for prayer and devotions every day. Even if I wake up late. Even if my phone is blinking with unread messages and notifications. Even if I'm itching to plunge into the to-do list for the day and slap some nice satisfyingly long tailed ticks in there. We make choices, every day. Small choices which mean great things in the big picture.
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